The results are in. Now what do we do?

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It’s late, it’s a school night, and I’m still awake, watching with bated breath who will win the 2016 presidential election.

Neither candidate is ideal in my opinion, but I voted for who I thought would do the least amount of damage. It’s quite sad that as a country, our options were limited to the least horrible candidate instead of the best choice for office.

While watching coverage of the polls coming in, I saw a tweet that ran across the bottom of the screen. To paraphrase, it said that no matter the new president, our country should stay the UNITED States of America.

The turnout for this election is the highest it’s been in history. Most states were “too close to call” for hours, which built up the anxiety over the winner. Key states, like Florida and Ohio, were going back and forth with who was ahead, and usually it was only by a few percentage points.

Results are in: Donald Trump will be our Commander in Chief for the next four years. I can’t tell if I’m upset or relieved. There is no longer a line in which the other candidate is better than the other. All I can hope for is that the checks and balances our country has in place will keep us from completely imploding.

Social media has, of course, gone crazy; people think that now that Trump is in office, every Muslim, Latino, gay, trans, and Black citizen is going to get jailed, deported, or worse, killed. This is where the line needs to be drawn and ground rules need to be set.

Although Donald Trump has proved to be a loose cannon at times, it is very unlikely that many of his outlandish plans will actually be put into action. As we’ve seen, a lot of Republicans didn’t agree with what Trump was standing for. Some people may be scared that Congress is controlled by Republicans now, but I have a feeling they will be able to keep Trump in check.

If the Congress was Democratic, we could forget about ever getting anything passes or changed in the next four years; but with Republicans, at least we have a chance of finding some sort of change.

There is one other thing that needs to be addressed about this explosion on social media: the attack of Trump supporters. Yes, it’s true that some people who support Trump are racists, bigots, misogynists and otherwise pretty terrible people.

But some people voted for him because they felt that Clinton was not the right choice for the position. Her scandals worried many Americans about how she would attend to security in the US, which I think is a legitimate concern.

So when I see posts telling Trump supporters that they are hated and despicable, I get angry. We have yet to see what Trump will actually do in office, so accusing people who voted for Trump of committing the heinous hypothetical crimes that may or may not be committed with Trump in office is ridiculous.

Am I happy with the results? No, I don’t think I am. Would I have been happier with Clinton as a president? No. There was no winning in this election. But the results are in, and we can’t change them now.

Instead of plotting a wild assassination attempt or hating people who voted Trump into office, we should all unite together. If we want to see America make it through these next four years, the American people need to learn how to work together and compromise. Regardless of who won, the people of this country are still the ones who have the power: that’s the beauty of a democracy.